music and culture from the sahel and sahara

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In 2015, I had the opportunity to work on a bit of a dream project entitled Uchronia, an exhibition and recording lying somewhere between conceptual art and experimental ethnography. The process was a series of collaborative “fake” ethnographies (or ethnographic forgeries) – a very flagrant self conscious expression in a field that and hides the role of the documentarians in documentary.

One of the more interesting recordings produced was the above titled “Bambara Affirmations” from
Bamako based Hip Hop producer/composer/rapper Luka Productions (facebook link). Modeled on the new age genre of affirmation music, the conception was a spontaneous, humorous conversation in Luka’s tiny studio, where we took clichéd and hackneyed phrases and translated them into Bambara (“you are transforming into a butterfly,” etc). The resultant track was mixed into a field recording and conjured scene: a stressed out Bamako taxi driver, gridlocked in stifling humidity of the fast growing riverside metropolis, concentrating on the soothing voice on the cassette.

Recently I proposed Luka to make a full album similar to the recording, based around the previous artifact, but further extrapolated. The first tracks have begun to trickle in via Whatsapp and Wetransfer, now to be mixed and mastered. They are at once familiar to Mali, lying between the measured griot speaking over a looping melody to the the verbal wordplay of contemporary Bamako Hip Hop, suggesting a continuity outside of the narrative of Western Influence in Global Hip Hop.

Luka says there has been a curious reaction to the songs: when he’s working in the studio, a nexus of Bamako Rap scene, many of the musicians and emcees are asking for copies of the tracks. As much as it is familiar, it is also something new – an artifact of a fake world. As we move forward into completion, perhaps they will find their way into an actual taxi, like some Borgean artifact. Will they carry forward a similar affirmation when reinterpreted by Bamako’s Hip Hop culture? Non-Bambara readership of the blog will have to remain in suspense for the moment. Stay tuned.

The next tour of Mdou Moctar is now underway – a short summer tour spanning the European continent. Because of certain visa problems, the tour was nearly canceled, but it fights its way forward.

Mdou and the band were scheduled to begin the tour on July 6th, their first tour to make any significant profit – a well deserved recompense from the past few years. But the art of touring is not easy, especially when you can’t get into the country. In the world of high risk/small return of musical tours, the complications arising from a broken visa system make an already fraught endeavor nearly impossible. Alas, for the latest tour, the tainted system has again reminded us of it’s failings.

As former colonial overlords of the Niger Republique, the French state retains a powerful and problematic position, perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the symbolic structure of the Embassy, a prison-like structure with towering white walls and barbed wire, where the potential visa appointees “waiting room” is the dusty streetside under the shadow of armed guards. The visa system asks the following: proof beyond a reasonable doubt that you have no plan to overstay your visa. The system makes no claims of egalitarianism and the inequity is as immutable as the Saharan heat, dust storms, and drought.

What is pragmatically frustrating is though the laws and guidelines controlling visas are clear and transparent, the path to visa is through an obtuse and broken consulate system.* The visa process is a proverbial black box – we make our requests, and await with baited breath for an answer to pop out the other side. In the case of Niger, the opaque nature becomes more nefarious. Niger lacks consulates and the French Embassy represents all 26 Schengen countries in visa affairs, except Spain. The process concentrates immense power in one individual – the bureaucrat capable of handling communication between the citizen and a mysterious and anonymous system.

Over the years of navigating the minefield, the problems are always strangely timed, rarely refusals but simply errors that delay and impede (the visa denial rate for the French Consulate is quite low – only 9% of visas are refused*) For a tour in 2015, Mdou Moctar was asked the day of his flight to provide personal invitations from the Mayor’s of Paris, Lyon, and Marseilles – mid-day on a Friday afternoon. On the eve of this summer’s tour, with the confidence of a well trod path, the band again submitted documents as requested. This time there was a strange new request: the band was to provide legalized work permits for every country they would be touring. After contacting the proper respective countries, they were informed there was no such thing – there is no work permit. Nevertheless, the French Consulate in Niger insisted that no visa would be issued without providing documents that do not even exist.

After much deliberation, the Embassy granted Mdou and the band a special Limited visa for France only – issued in rare, exceptional circumstances (for example, in 2015 the Niger French Consular issued only 33 LTVs vs 5,355 standard uniform visas)* Mdou and the band flew to Europe to play a few concerts and attempt to address the visa problem. Unable to leave the borders of France, they began to cancel shows. After much furious emails, phone calls, and struggle (the French embassy and the consulate never answered any emails) and with the assistance of Matthieu Petolla and Zone Franche, the Interior of the Minister of France reviewed the case, and forced the French Consulate to issue a proper visa – but they would have to return to Niger. The band boarded a plane and returned to Niamey, to a rather surprised visa consular who was forced to issue the correct visa, and they returned the same night to Paris.

Amid the loss of canceled shows and paying for last minute tickets to Niger, the tour now continues under a loss of two thirds of the programmed profit, a value around 7000 euros or 4.5 million CFA. One could interrogate that number alone. While the “first world” are operating myriad of development projects funneling billions of euros into the African continent, the gross operating budgets mean only a small percentage trickles down to the actual inhabitants of the countries they serve. Meanwhile, when a group of young musicians attempt to travel around the world, to earn their own money without aid or assistance, they are essential denied, and lose thousands of Euros – money that would fuel the local economy with no support from any governmental program, besides the expected consular duties. There is a certain irony in this.

One could argue that the system doesn’t seem to like individuals operating independently. As such, the impediments to traveling abroad make the act of touring itself an overtly political act. To tour as a disenfranchised artist is to be a renegade in clear defiance of the neo-colonial will, traveling to countries who don’t want you, while their citizens do. And so the tour continues, much in tune to its core, music as an act of resistance.

* In 2007, WOMEX hosted a seminar that was later organized into a “white paper” and forwarded to the European Parliament. The white paper “documents some of the major problems…[focusing on] administrative procedures, lack of transparency, lack of harmonization, costs and ineffective information systems.” The full paper is available here.

* All the statistics regarding Schengen visas in every consulate around the world is available here

Kader Tarhanine is the musician that you don’t know about, but should. The “you” in question is the presumed readership of the blog, which with the wide reach and randomness of the internet could be really anyone, but would assume to exclude most Tuareg’s themselves – one of the contradictions in working across cultures, but alas.

Group Afous D’Afous is a six person guitar group from Tamanrasset, Algeria. The group is led by Kader Tarhanine, perhaps the most famous and preferred guitarist throughout the Tuareg diaspora over the past 5 years. His song “Tarhanine Tegla” (en: “My Love is Gone”) was one of those “viral” successes of the Bluetooth/Cellphone/Mp3 network of music trading (even Youtube, where the video has over one million views). The song, where he got his name, has a programed drum with a heavy bass kick that loops throughout, with a call and response lyrics dancing with an infectious electric guitar riff. The lyrics owe much to it’s popularity: Kader is heralded as a both a musician and a poet amongst Tuareg fans, where the past years have seen a blight of covers and embarrassingly poorly written songs (infuriating older guitarists, one who recently told me
“our music was meant to convey a message, today the musicians barely know Tamashek, just know a few words like “tenere,” and make a song out of it”).

Kader Tarhanine and Afous D’Afous have become stars at home, and are by far the most famous Tuareg band in Algeria. They’ve recorded an album in 2015 that went on to fill all the cellphones from Sebha to Timbouctou, and have recorded several videos with quite high production value.

Which is all the more curious that in the current Western fascination of Tuareg music, where new albums seem to come out every week on record labels, the band seems to have been passed over – missed by (Western) labels*, curators, and just about every music journalist. On a personal note, we (being the larger “Sahel Sounds family that includes just about every musician we work with) kept waiting for this to be picked up by a Western label, and it wasn’t, so we contacted the band. Hopefully this release will help rectify this glossing oversite and set the record straight, as it were.

The single “Tarhanine Tegla” is now available on limited 7″. On the flip is the autotuned Maghrebi influenced “Tarhanam Toussasi.” The records are special old school offset printed fold over. The 7″ is available through the shop, through bandcamp, and just about every other digital platform.

*update: the band was produced in 2015 by the Algerian project Imzad, further identifying the group previously known as Kader Tarhanine as “Group Afous D’Afous”

I found John Sofakole’s cassette in a dusty dark corner of the Centre de Formation et de promotion Musicale (CFPM), Niger’s formerly prolific center for modern music in Niamey. The CFPM once housed an active studio, and the archives read a bit like detritus of something grand and powerful that doesn’t quite match up with the vision of today. I had heard John’s name before in the stories of other musicians, but these were the first songs I had heard. As is the case with most the history of popular music in Niger, nothing is written, little is recorded, and the legacy of the artists of the past decades mostly survives in the memory of songs.

We meet up at the same center, sitting under a tree in the courtyard. John tells stories between the songs, and recounts the old days. John Sofakole, real name Abdoulaye Halidou Maïguizo, grew up in Dosso, a town just south of Niamey. It’s from here that he takes his name. In 1989, John won the Prix Dan Gourmou, a prize established a few years prior to award the burgeoning scene of “modern music” in Niger. His song was titled Sofakole, and recounted the story of a lake in Dosso, haunted by a djinn.

Sofakole is a song about a seasonal lake near Dosso. It’s an old sacred place called Fada Bongo, an enchanted lake inhabited by a djinni. Each six months, the people of Dosso made sacrifices to the lake: chickens, goats, and all sorts of animals, preferably with black fur, would be sacrificed at the lakes edge. The meat would be shared and consumed by the people. The lake could have the blood. The sacrifice was an obligation to the lake, like most lakes possessed by djinn or Mami Wata, an observed ritual ensuring safety. In the rainy season, the water would grow into a deep lake, and if the sacrifice wasn’t made, it would swallow up whomever entered.

John’s brief rise to fame brought him around the country, joining with other stars like Ali Djibo and Guez Band, and eventually he ended up traveling abroad and performing in Japan. For most of the Nigerien artists of the “modern music,” there was a brief moment in the 1990s that contemporary music seemed to have government support and interest, particularly in the development of the CFPM, a government sponsored music institution that now is a shadow of it’s former activity..

Like the CFPM, the lake of Sofakole is no more. What happened was this: one day, the djinni swallowed up the son of a powerful fisherman. The child had traveled to Dosso for a school course, and was playing in the lake when he disappeared into the lake. The father, incensed that the djinn would have the audacity to make such an error against the son of a fisherman ordered it to leave. “And the djinni left. It’s still in the region, hiding somewhere. Today there’s no water,” John explains. “There’s some water maybe below, but not like before.”

Forty years coming, Azna de L’Ader finally has an official release! One of the seminal rock bands from Niger, Azna was hardly known outside of the country – and mostly confined to the Tahoua region of Niger. The LP version features highlights of their recording history, restored and remastered from the archives at Radio Niger (ORTN). Vinyl edition comes with a book of photos and liner notes. Grab it at bandcamp or at the shop.